this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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'Cheating and exploiting undermine the integrity of our game': Over 600 Star Citizen accounts have been suspended for racking up in-game currency (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 5 months ago by nanoUFO to c/games
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[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Some additional info the article doesn't address or skims over:

The accounts were suspended for 3 months.

They only suspended accounts that were overly abusing the system. Players that duped on accident, or a small number of times were not punished except for the removal of some of their in-game currency and maybe a ship or two that they bought with the earnings they made from duping.

This is the first time that Star Citizen players have had a wave of suspensions like this for an exploit.

This is most likely because of how this exploit affected the servers. In Star Citizen, abandoned ships stick around forever on a particular instance, so other players would need to hijack/tow/destroy/salvage them to get rid of them. The players abusing this exploit would duplicate ships with cargo (that could be sold) as fast as they possibly could, leaving more ships behind than what the servers can normally handle well.

This also happened around the time of a free fly event where anyone could try out the game for a bit without having to pay. So the game wasn't performing as well as it could have been during this event. Although, tbh, this game usually struggles during free flight events anyway.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Although, tbh, this game usually struggles during free flight events anyway.

Or just in general.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Besides updates where overall performance has tanked for a bit, if you generally have issues playing this game then that's more likely a hardware issue.

This game is not optimized and requires a beefy CPU (Performs best using an AMD with 3D v-cache ), a fast SSD (HDD will tank your FPS with all the streaming of assets that needs to happen), and a decent GPU.

The game has been running well since they got rid of the dupers, even with Xenothreat running... now if they would just fix the UI so I can see who I'm shooting at when there are targets/friendlies all over...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Nah. It's directly related to player count. It's the servers & engine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That definitely plays a part, but if a player doesn't have a computer that's up to spec, they'll have a bad time no matter what.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Sure but that's a very generalized statement for any game and clearly not what I was getting at. Standing in one location and having FPS fluctuations of up to 50 FPS based on server load is definitely not a PC spec issue.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

So is this game worth exploiting (ahem I mean) playing?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

That's no way to treat role playing space pirates

This actually might be a good use case for a proof of steak open ledger, kind of like a cryptocurrency, but no crypto required.

Every item in game would have a chain of custody to an origination event, duplicates would be trivially obvious, you could see where bugs are duplicating things, or at least the time they got duplicated.

Incrementing and integer in a database is fine, and efficient, but but when you start to make it a currency, then you have fungibility issues and chain the custody issues like we're seeing now.

Obviously this can always be addressed by writing perfect code and accounting for every origination in the code, but if the programmers aren't perfect, moving to a ledger makes more sense

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (2 children)

proof of steak

Is that like a cryocurrency?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

More like open sauce version of a database.

More like inventory management and less like cryptography. It's an open ledger, which is commonly used in cryptography, but is also useful in inventory management

Right now star citizen has a database, and they control the values in the database, but these duplication glitches mean some of the code which has authority to change these values is doing it incorrectly. So the database itself just has extra integers added all willy nilly.

An open ledger, would provide a chain to custody for every new item in the game, at least the money, making these duplication glitches either impossible or, trivially obvious when they happen

There's no reason this could not be implemented on a traditional database no need to make it open, or using distributed ledger technology, but distributed ledgers exist, and depending on how they program, could be just drop in to their program.

Plus an open ledger would mean all of these space cowboys would keep an eye on it and raise hell when they saw something fishy

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think he was making lighthearted fun of you for misspelling stake.

[–] huskypenguin 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

He knows. Thats why he said open sauce.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Missed that one lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Is that like a cryocurrency?

I’m getting chills just thinking about it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I can't wait for my entire GPU to be used so I can't steal money in a single player game.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It shouldn't have anything to do with client-side code.

The universe infrastructure has a database now, that database now needs to track where money comes from and where it goes, so instead of saying you have a dollar and somebody else loses a dollar it says Bob sent you a dollar.

Or for the ships, instead of duplicating a ship, you update the title record of the ship to say who the current owner is, with a history of all the previous owners.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Thanks for the explanation. Your idea seems well thought out, my comment is out of place since I read Starfield as the name of the game.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Something like this would just be cool for MMOs with craftabke items. People.could confirm you made it and now you're a virtually famous item designer or blacksmith or whatever.

[–] Cyberspark 1 points 5 months ago

Except it's a ledger, not a db. Devs can't alter the ledger, only provide transactions. You get scammed by a player, someone hacks your account and steals your stuff. The devs might be able to give you replacement stuff, but they can't take it from the hackers or who you traded to.

This gets worse with crypto where each item is unique. The devs can't then just make more money/items to replace your loss.

There's a good reason why databases are used

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

But isnt the game in pre-alpha or whatever not finish state?

Don't they reset the servers regularly? People are supposed to test the shit out of it... How can you be suspended?

This scam makes non senses...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Okay, so I was around for this, so I saw what was involved and the outcome. To do the exploit involved filling your ship with some valuable cargo and then leaving it parked in a spot where it was technically not landed, in order to intentionally glitch the cargo grid. This would then let you sell the same cargo over and over.

The result of this was huge amounts of ships littering the landing zones in a completely unintended way, which would tank both the FPS of anyone else in the area and the server tick rate. This in turn makes the game look worse, it hampers efforts to test other things, etc etc.

As for the testing of exploits argument, CIG did say in their announcement that such is actively encouraged. They only suspended accounts for people who were doing it over and over and over and over and over. Basically anyone who was just using it to grind huge amounts of in-game money and making the play and testing experience for everyone else worse. Most of these people weren't even reporting the bug.

Probably a lot of them were selling the credits on ebay, which… yes, is a thing, sadly. Even though progress is still being wiped occasionally, there's still gold farmers. There's actually a warning you have to click through every single login for this, but I've seen people argue for it, the idiots.

BTW, it's in alpha right now, not pre-alpha (which I don't personally believe is a thing).

[–] gravitas_deficiency 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

…in a primarily single player game.

Ok then.

Edit:

lol oops

Star Citizen != Spacerim (Starbound)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Star Citizen is an exclusively online game, though?